Breaking The Maya Code: The Maya writing decipherment

Breaking The Maya Code: The Maya writing decipherment

Breaking the Maya Code is a result of eleven years in the making. It started originally, with a conversation between director David Lebrun and archeologist Michael Coe (author of the book “Breaking the Maya Code”). Inscriptions in remote locations presented formidable challenges in major shooting locations in Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatan and Honduras.

“This is one astounding piece of filmmaking. It’s thrilling to see and entire culture reconnecting with its awe inspiring past. You are going to be spellbound by Breaking the Maya Code”

Jeffrey Kauffman

1 Introduction

In the jungles of Southern Mexico and Central America, the ancient Mayans created a stunning civilization with achievements in astronomy, mathematics and art. Their cities were rich with stones and inscriptions with hundreds of glyphs(…) painted on pottery and the walls of buildings and written in thousands of paper fold books. But when the European explored and discovered these inscriptions no one on Earth could read them. What messages did they concealed, who had made them, where they pictures and symbols, or where they true writing standing in the sound of an unspoken language?

2 The Mayan Books

In a great pyre he burned all the hieroglyphic books he could find, claiming that they contained only lies of the Devil. “The writing system totally died out in the centuries that followed the Spanish Conquest”. “We probably lost forever lots of history. And of course, out of that all, there are only 4 books, or partial books survived” One Mayan code, probably sent back to Europe by Cortez made its way to the Royal Library of Dresden German, it is called the Dresden Codex or manuscript book…

3 The Maya Scripts

As more sites were discovered explored their best to draw and document the glyphs. Their forms were unfamiliar and the monuments were all in decade. But the greatest obstacle was the complexity of the script itself. We now know that the Ancient Mayas scribes had tremendously latitude for visual creativity. Their system had strict rules. They arranged the glyphs on double columns read from left to right and top to bottom…

4. The Mayan Calendar

Gradually, Forstemann worked out how the Mayan marked time, a system now called the calendar round. The calendar round is made out of three interlocking cycles, a 365 days solar year, a cycle of 20 names and a cycle of 13 numbers. Days are designated by the ways these three cycles line up. 52 years will pass before the three cycles line up the same way again…